The Muzhir Family

Marriage as a Disaster Mitigation Strategy

Abstract

The Muzhir family (Banū Muzhir) was an elite Arab-Muslim civilian family in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, which produced six kātib al-sirrs (chief-secretary) of Damascus and Cairo for four generations. In the fifteenth-century Mamluk government, a large payment was required to assume a high-ranking office, and bureaucrats also faced the risk of arbitrary discharge and confiscation. In those situations, individuals needed to establish relationships with prominent figures in the government to seek recommendations and intercession. For this purpose, they used their family line as a ‘survival strategy,’ and marriage played a significant role in mitigating the potential extinction of a family line or a sudden downfall.

This paper begins to reconstruct the chronological process of how this family of Syrian origins established a foothold in Cairo. We then attempt to clarify the meaning of marriage for bureaucrat families by focusing on how their personal relationships, built by marriage, worked to develop members’ careers in the family line and thus served as safety nets against potential crises.

Banū Muzhir was counted as one of the most prestigious bureaucrat families in fifteenth-century Cairo. However, our investigation shows that they had largely sustained their genealogy by relying on connections built through marriage. For them, the most important factor for developing the careers of young family members, in addition to their father’s legacy and administrative offices, was to succeed in human relationships. They succeeded strategically through renewed relationships with other prominent civilian families built in the previous generations, and expanded these by concluding marriages. Their extended family networks served as safety nets to cope with the unstable situations of the fifteenth century; among these, marriage was of the utmost importance among bureaucrat families.